Posted on Apr 10, 2019
The “groundbreaking result” from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project will be announced on Wednesday, April 10 at 9 a.m via six press conferences will be held simultaneously around the globe. This includes one by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which is being held in Washington D.C’s National Press Club and will be chaired by director France Córdova.
The Milky Way’s supermassive central black hole, Sag A*, has four million times the mass of our sun, which means that the object is about 44 million kilometers across. That may sound like a huge target, but for the telescope array on Earth some 26,000 light-years (or 245 trillion kilometers) away, it’s like trying to photograph a golf ball on the Moon.
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The National Science Foundation event will include a panel of experts: the director of the EHT project, Shepherd Doeleman, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Daniel Marrone, an astronomer with the University of Arizona, Avery Broderick, from the University of Waterloo in Canada, and Sera Markoff, of the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Alternatively, a press conference is being held by the European Commission, European Research Council, and the EHT project will also be livestreamed on the European Southern Observatory website here. Viewers can ask questions by using the hashtag #AskEHTeu.
This event will take place in Brussels, Belgium, and will be led by Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation. He will be joined by Anton Zensus, Chair of the EHT Collaboration Board, Heino Falcke, the Chair of the EHT Science Council, Monika Mościbrodzka, the working group coordinator for the EHT, Luciano Rezzolla, EHT Board Member, and Eduardo Ros, the EHT Board Secretary.
Viewers can watch the event via the livestream below: